If
anything illustrates how surreal and overhyped the Canadian cannabis
industry has become, it could be sitting next to Gene Simmons while he
explains why he’s accepting $10-million worth of shares in Invictus MD
Strategies Corp., a White Rock, B.C.-based junior producer, to act as
its chief evangelist officer. After all, the famous Kiss bassist only
subscribes to two tenets of the sex, drugs and rock and roll mantra,
famously eschewing the drugs part. He doesn’t even drink. But that
hasn’t stopped him from taking advantage of those who do.

“It is
stupid to abuse drugs and it is stupid to abuse alcohol, and there are
repercussions to that, but I have a restaurant chain and we certainly
serve alcohol,” Simmons says. “You get a menu in life if you’re lucky
and you get to choose what you want to consume.”

Both Invictus
CEO and founder Dan Kriznic and Simmons take pains to point out that
he’s not promoting a particular product. For one thing, celebrity
cannabis endorsements are verboten in Canada. For another, there aren’t
any products on the shelf yet. But that doesn’t mean people’s tongues
aren’t hanging out at the possibilities. A Deloitte study in 2016
pegged the initial potential impact of legal cannabis in Canada at
$22.6 billion a year when you factor in sales and ancillary factors
such as security and transportation. And that figure doesn’t include
spinoff benefits like taxes, fees and tourism.

But here are a
few sobering thoughts before we all get too giddy about the corporate
prospects of the cannabis business. For starters, cannabis sales are
initially projected to be worth about $5.5 billion annually, according
to a Parliamentary Budget Officer report in 2017. To put that in some
context, the Liquor Control Board of Ontario brought in $5.6 billion in
sales last year, good enough for No. 86 on this year’s FP500 ranking of
the